Tuesday, October 19, 2010

The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) has fifty-seven member states.

Everyone knows that. That’s what the OIC keeps telling us over and over again. Whenever you hear the OIC mentioned, the number fifty-seven is always closely associated with it. Heinz has its 57 flavors, and the OIC has its 57 countries.

Or does it?

Let’s take a look at the membership roll. I picked up the list of countries and their dates of entry from the OIC’s website, and joined it with a database of population figures from 2004 to construct the table below. It’s not up-to-the minute, but it will serve as a rough guideline to the makeup of the OIC:

Country

Population

Muslim pop.

%

Entry

Afghanistan

29,928,987

29,629,697

99.0%

1969

Albania

3,563,112

2,494,178

70.0%

1992

Algeria

32,531,853

32,206,534

99.0%

1969

Azerbaijan

7,911,974

7,389,783

93.4%

1992

Bahrain

688,345

585,093

85.0%

1972

Bangladesh

144,319,628

127,001,272

88.0%

1974

Benin

7,460,025

1,492,005

20.0%

1983

Brunei

372,361

249,481

67.0%

1984

Burkina Faso

13,925,313

7,658,922

55.0%

1974

Cameroon

16,380,005

3,276,001

20.0%

1974

Chad

9,826,419

5,306,266

54.0%

1969

Comoros

671,247

664,534

99.0%

1976

Côte d'Ivoire

17,298,040

6,677,043

38.6%

2001

Djibouti

476,703

471,935

99.0%

1978

Egypt

77,505,756

70,530,237

91.0%

1969

Gabon

1,389,201

13,892

1.0%

1974

Gambia

1,593,256

1,433,930

90.0%

1974

Guinea

9,467,866

8,047,686

85.0%

1969

Guinea-Bissau

1,416,027

538,090

38.0%

1974

Guyana

765,283

76,528

10.0%

1998

Indonesia

241,973,879

213,469,356

88.2%

1969

Iran

68,017,860

67,337,681

99.0%

1969

Iraq

26,074,906

25,292,658

97.0%

1975

Jordan

5,759,732

5,471,745

95.0%

1969

Kazakhstan

15,185,844

7,137,346

47.0%

1995

Kuwait

2,335,648

1,985,300

85.0%

1969

Kyrgyzstan

5,146,281

4,117,024

80.0%

1992

Lebanon

3,826,018

2,678,212

70.0%

1969

Libya

5,765,563

5,592,596

97.0%

1969

Malaysia

23,953,136

14,467,694

60.4%

1969

Maldives

349,106

348,756

99.9%

1976

Mali

12,291,529

11,062,376

90.0%

1969

Mauritania

3,086,859

3,083,772

99.9%

1969

Morocco

32,725,847

32,300,410

98.7%

1969

Mozambique

19,406,703

3,881,340

20.0%

1994

Niger

11,665,937

10,499,343

90.0%

1969

Nigeria

128,771,988

64,385,994

50.0%

1986

Oman

3,001,583

2,971,567

99.0%

1972

Pakistan

162,419,946

156,491,617

96.4%

1969

Palestine

3,761,904

3,159,999

84.0%

1969

Qatar

863,051

819,898

95.0%

1972

Saudi Arabia

26,417,599

26,417,599

100.0%

1969

Senegal

11,126,832

10,459,222

94.0%

1969

Sierra Leone

6,017,643

3,610,585

60.0%

1972

Somalia

8,591,629

8,591,629

100.0%

1969

Sudan

40,187,486

26,121,865

65.0%

1969

Suriname

438,144

96,391

22.0%

1996

Syria

18,448,752

16,234,901

88.0%

1972

Tajikistan

7,163,506

6,805,330

95.0%

1992

Togo

5,681,519

778,368

13.7%

1997

Tunisia

10,074,951

9,974,201

99.0%

1969

Turkey

69,660,559

68,963,953

99.0%

1969

Turkmenistan

4,952,081

4,407,352

89.0%

1992

Uganda

27,269,482

4,090,422

15.0%

1974

United Arab Emirates

2,563,212

1,948,041

76.0%

1972

Uzbekistan

26,851,195

23,897,563

89.0%

1996

Yemen

20,727,063

20,519,792

99.0%

1969

As you can see, among all the member states of the OIC, there are 1.18 billion Muslims out of 1.44 billion people, or about 82% of the total population.

Of the countries with a majority Muslim population, there are 1.15 billion Muslims out of 1.33 billion people, or about 86% of the population of those countries.

“Wait just a minute, Baron,” you say, “one of those is not a country!”And you are quite correct. One of the majority-Muslim “countries” is “Palestine”, which is not a country at all. It consists of bits of territory that belong to Egypt and Jordan and have never been assigned by peace treaty to any other states.

So that knocks the number down to fifty-six right there.

There are also eleven non-Muslim countries on the list. They contain a total of 28 million Muslims out of 113 million people, or about 25%. One of them — Gabon — is only 1% Muslim, and five more are at 20% or lower. None of these can properly be called a “Muslim country”, and they should not be members of the OIC.

That brings us down to forty-five.

Of the Muslim majority countries, three (Burkina Faso, Chad, and Nigeria) are hovering close to 50%. Nigeria certainly doesn’t consider itself a “Muslim country”, yet it’s a member of the OIC.

I move to strike all three of them. That leaves us with the real OIC, which has forty-two members, or 26% fewer than it officially claims.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

What’s going on here? Why does the OIC include so many more “Muslim” countries than are statistically warranted?

Part of the reason is surely the well-known Islamic propensity for bragging about the Muslim world and inflating its importance. In Islam, things are always bigger, better, and more accomplished than any realistic analysis would support.

But there’s more to it than that. Take a close look at this table of non-Muslim members of the OIC:

Country

Entry

% Muslim

Benin

1983

20.0%

Cameroon

1974

20.0%

Côte d'Ivoire

2001

38.6%

Gabon

1974

1.0%

Guinea-Bissau

1974

38.0%

Guyana

1998

10.0%

Kazakhstan

1995

47.0%

Mozambique

1994

20.0%

Suriname

1996

22.0%

Togo

1997

13.7%

Uganda

1974

15.0%

What’s notable about these countries is that they joined the OIC relatively late. None was a founding member in 1969, and the majority of them were admitted to the OIC in 1990 or later.

To make the correlation even clearer, examine the scattergram below. It plots the percentage of Muslims against the year of entry into the OIC, and I’ve calculated a line of regression to make the trend obvious:

This timeline coincides with the Muslim Brotherhood’s intensified push to dominate the United Nations through the OIC. The OIC is recognized as a corporate entity by the UN, and the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam — which was signed by all members of the OIC — was registered as a formal document with the UN in the early 1990s.

Thus it becomes obvious that the oil-rich Muslim countries of the Middle East used their… ahem… persuasive powers to induce those small, unimportant, and poverty-stricken non-Muslim countries to join the OIC. By signing the OIC’s policy documents, they committed themselves to voting the Islamic party line in the General Assembly. This frequently gave the Islamic bloc a working majority, which it has used to its advantage ever since.

The inflated membership of the OIC is what has given us all those hundreds of “human rights” complaints against Israel. The OIC’s clout in the UN has brought us to the verge of a binding resolution that will require all the UN’s member states to pass laws criminalizing the “defamation of religions, including Islam”.

This strategy was a shrewd move on the part of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. Back in the 1990s no one was paying any attention to Islam — they were either enriching themselves in the dot-com boom or laughing about the stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress.

“Islam? What the heck is that?”

Well, now we know.

Many thanks to our Flemish correspondent VH for coming up with the idea for this post. I used a different dataset than he did, so my analysis is slightly different, but we are in broad general agreement.

That said, they are too powerful at the UN and have a negative agenda concerning human rights and Western values.

So what to do at the UN? Try to eliminate all blocs? Perhaps institute a secret ballot for final decisions in the GA?

There are about 140 other member states. Why don't Western and free states organize a bloc to offset the OIC?

Rather than just dump on the UN, which is so easy, it should be used as a tool to improve conduct of the bad actors. Without the UN, it would probably be worse. That does not mean there are not always serious problems that could explode at any time, with it or without it.

It would be also more interesting to find data about the demographic trends of these countries.The rate of growth of the population and the share of Muslims when they entered in the OIC and now.Christianity is growing fast in Africa and elsewhere. Many blacks are emigrating to live in the North Africa, it would be ironic that as the Muslims in North Africa move in Europe, the Christians Blacks of Africa move in North Africa.

Interesting analysis of how the Muslim brotherhood made a catspaw out of the UN. The Islamic bloc voting and colluding with other non-democracies like China also explains how the countries with the world's worst human rights records sit on the UN's so-called Human Rights organ and Iran (that has women prisoners raped before execution so they cannot enter Muslim heaven) was just put on the UN's Women's issues committee while bankrupt Portugal was installed on the Security Council instead of Canada. Will Portugal now take over fighting (and dying) in Afghanistan from Canada?

The UN in its sclerotic anti-West leftism is unfixable. Get the UN out of the US and the US out of the UN. Let this group of grubby unelected bureaucrats headquarter in Zimbabwe for example and apply themselves to their problems instead of swanning around NYC lecturing their betters.

It is odd that countries with a very low percentage of Muslims, such as Gabon, Guyana, Togo and Uganda, are part of an Islamic bloc. The Muslim population of Israel, which is obviously not an Islamic country, is 16%.

I come from Albania and in 2011 there was a population census, where some islamic-nationalists opposed mentioning the religion in this census. Some calculations show that after the atheist regime going on for 30 years less that 40% of the population declare themselfs muslim, even some others go below that number or 35%.

In the next future indifference will grow and this percentage, I think, will diminish.